IMPACT: The consolidationof FedBizOpps withFedTeds is expected to produce$1.6 million in costavoidance for fiscal 2009.The fiscal 2007 Office ofManagement and Budgetannual report to Congresson e-government estimatedthat IAE produced about$5.3 million worth of costavoidance and $29 millionin cost savings to federalagencies.

DURATION: IAE was one ofthe original President'sManagement Agendae-government projectslaunched in 2002.

COST: The annual budgetis about $45 million.

HALF A DECADE IS A LONG TIME when measured at a digital pace.But recall, if you can, the era before the President'sManagement Agenda launched 24 e-government projects in 2002. Therewere a lot of uncoordinated and duplicated efforts, a lack of datastandards, and a variety of commercial and incompatible systems. Inshort, a mess.

So when the government looked for sure-fire e-government projectsto turn pan-government muddles into cross-government solutions, oneno-brainer was procurement-related systems. Hence the IntegratedAcquisition Environment, a General Services Administration-ledeffort that coalesced the procurement world into ninegovernmentwide systems.

IAE 'just makes life so much easier for thegovernment,' said Ray Bjorklund, senior vice president ofFedSources.

One of the nine IAE systems is the Central ContractorRegistration database, which started life as a DefenseDepartment-only system. It also includes the Excluded Parties ListSystem, a searchable and downloadable database of individuals andcompanies suspended or debarred from doing business with thegovernment.

And there's the Federal Business Opportunities Web site,one-stop Web site for information on upcoming governmentprocurements worth more than $25,000. The site underwent somesignificant changes in 2008.

A new version of FedBizOpps was finally unveiled in April afterit was delayed for years by vendor protests. And as a result,'the initial migration was not pretty,' said ChrisFornecker, director of GSA's office of acquisition systems.'The short version is that as a result of the protests, thecooperation between old and new vendors was poor. But oncestabilized, most everything I've heard is verypositive,' he added.

Protests aside, IAE fulfilled its original mission and begantaking it a step further this year, particularly withFedBizOpps.

The President's Management Agenda directed IAE tointegrate and streamline the acquisition processes, which it did.But within the nine IAE systems, there was still redundancy,'even on just mundane things like user registration,'Fornecker said.

A program charged with trimming fat was called on to shed someof its own weight.

Officials started with the Federal Technical Data Solutionssystem, known as FedTeds, which agencies use to disseminatetechnical drawings, specifications and other post-award sensitivematerial to vendors. From a technical point of view, the systemclosely resembles FedBizOpps, Fornecker said. Both distributedocuments, so why not aggregate them?

The new FedBizOpps released April 1 is a new system. 'Itdid not leverage the original code. It was built from the groundup,' Fornecker said. That gave IAE officials the opportunityto kill two birds with one stone.

IAE operated from the start with an adoptadapt- acquire approachto technology. In fiscal 2008, it added aggregate to that list.

'It was easy to collapse [FedBizOpps and FedTeds] bysimply adding a few tables to the database for some additionalinformation,' Fornecker said. 'Most of what was beingdone was duplicative. It wasn't that big a deal.'

The result is that IAE now operates two systems basically forthe price of one.

Aggregating FedBizOpps with FedTeds promises to be just thefirst technological restructuring of IAE, which will migrate to aservice-oriented architecture supported by a single operations andmaintenance vendor.

'We frankly don't need nine databases,' headded, 'we probably can get by with one and just add tablesand data elements to capture some of the unique services [of ] someof these systems.'

It was the successful combination of Fed- BizOpps with FedTedsthat gave IAE officials the confidence to go ahead with a SOAapproach, said Earl Warrington, director of the IAE systemsdivision. 'The test there was 'Could we do it?'And the answer was 'Yes we could,' ' he said.

The General Services Administration’s IntegratedAcquisition Environment is fairly heterogeneous. The FederalBusiness Opportunities Web site, for example, is scripted via PHP.Programmers built the Federal Procurement Data System using Javaand put an Oracle database underneath it.

“We’re all over the map in terms of what we havetoday, which adds complexity and expense to operations andmaintenance,” said Chris Fornecker, director of GSA’soffice of acquisition systems.

That should change during the next four to five years, as IAEmigrates to a service-oriented architecture, the first steps ofwhich IAE undertook when it released the new version of FedBizOppsApril 1. The system combined FedBizOpps with the Federal TechnicalData Solutions system (FedTeds), but it also included a userregistration service that could become a reusable component for theIAE SOA, said Earl Warrington, director of the IAE systemsdivision. “This is where we knew we had somethinggoing,” he added.

Other IAE systems also have services that could become reusablecomponents, such as the Wage Determinations OnLine system’sworkflow process.

The new FedBizOpps is a Linux system using Apache Web servers,MySQL relational database management and scripted with PHP. Theonly glitch in combining FedBizOpps with FedTeds was in reconcilingdifferent registration processes, IAE officials said.

“We had to normalize that procedure so that you had afront end that was consistent whether you were going to use FedTedsor whether you were going to use” FedBizOpps, Warringtonsaid.